Moon Tiger book review - 1987 Booker Prize Reviews: Good: First of all, Lively's writing is incredible. Her descriptions of characters and her eye for detail bring the most everyday situations to life. You know these people; you can feel Lisa's pain especially at growing up in the shadow of her flamboyant mother, a woman who doesn't want her daughter to call her mother because it's just too ordinary, and ordinary is what Claudia can never be. Although Tom is the lover of her life, the man for whom she pines to her dying breath, the real love of her life is her brother Gordon, the only relationship that lasts. Bostonbibliophile, May 11th 2011 for full review click here Not so good: While readers who come to hear an author discuss his or her book at the Guardian book club are usually fans, those who contribute to the blog on the book club website are sometimes detractors. The impatient and unimpressed are at least as likely to take to the keyboard as the enthusiastic, especially if the book in question has been garlanded with any awards.

So there is something unusual about the unanimity of readers writing about Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger on the book club website. Contributors all wanted to express their admiration – but also their sense that Lively's novel has not had its critical due. Guardian book club, John Mullan 22nd May 2010 for full review click here About the author Penelope Lively was born in March 1933 in Cairo, Egypt and spent her childhood there. She came to England at the age of twelve, in 1945, and went to boarding school in Sussex. She subsequently read Modern History at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. Penelope Lively lives in London. 1969 - Something To Answer For 2016 Pulitzer Prize Winner It's a massive day in arts and journalism because the 100th annual Pulitzer Prize winners were just announced, and there's a big surprise.

2015's best artistic and nonfiction writing across 21 categories were recognized during a ceremony Monday afternoon at Columbia University in New York City. The first Pulitzer Prize was awarded to Hebert Bayward Swope, a reporter for The New York World, in 1916. (And if you're as big a fan of Newsies as I am, that paper should ring a bell, but try to think of it more positively.) The major prize for book nerds, the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press), a legitimate surprise, if you've been paying attention to the book nerd and industry buzz. The feeling around the prize in the last few months would have you putting all your hard-earned cash down on A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara to take home the award, but that's why you should never gamble. Viet Thanh Nguyen is no less deserving, and moreover, it's his debut novel, which makes it such a wonderful win. Extract from New York Times to view full article...

1987 Booker Prize 1987 Booker Prize Winner: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively Shortlist Cover illustration by Jenny Tilden-Wright Dustjacket synopsis: "Claudia Hampton - beautiful, famous, independent - is dying. "Meanwhile she tells her nurses: 'I'm writing a history of the world', the 'whole triumphant murderous unstoppable chute'. As memories cloud in, Claudia re-creates the richly patterned mosaic of her life and times, from childhood just after the First World War to the present day. But as Claudia, the successful and popular historian knows, her story is enmeshed with the stories of others, and they too must speak: Gordon, her brother and adored adversary; Jasper, charming, untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool convetnional daughter - and, at the centre of Claudia's life, Tom, her one great love, both found and lost in wartime Egypt." Quotes: "Her most ambitious book to date.

I think it is also the best...there is a new emotional depth to Penelope Lively's writing" - The Times "A very clever book: it is evocative, thought-provoking and hangs curiously on the edges of the mind long after it is finished" - Literary Review "One of the finest British novelists now writing" - Independent "A complex tapestry of great sublety...Penelope Lively writes so well, savouring the words as she goes" - Daily Telegraph First Paragraph: 'I'm writing a history of the world,' she says. And the hands of the nurse are arrested for a moment; she looks down at this old woman, this old ill woman. 'Well, my goodness,' the nurse says. 'That's quite a thing to be doing, isn't it?' And then she becomes busy again, she heaves and tucks and smooths - 'Upsy a bit dear, that's a good girl - then we'll get you a cup of tea.' A history of the world. To round things off, I may as well - no more nit-picking stuff about Napoleon, Tito, the battle of Edgehill, Hernando Cortez...The works, this time.

The whole triumphant murderous unstoppable chute - from the mud to the stars, universal and particular, your story and mine. I'm equipped, I consider; electicism has always been my hallmark. That's what they've said, though it has been given other names. Claudia Hampton's range is ambitious, some might say imprudent: my enemies. Miss Hampton's bold conceptual sweep: my friends. From the Penguin paperback edition, 1988. Cover design by Siobhan Keaney Dustjacket synopsis: "Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, published nearly thirty years ago, was hailed as a classic and has sold in millions and in over forty languages round the world. His 4th novel A Man of the People published in 1966 was in Anthony Burgess' 1984 selections of the 99 best novels in English since 1939. Now comes this fine novel full of savage irony, set in a country where power has corrupted ideals, terror has silenced all but the bravest, and only fools and flatterers survive.

"Two years after the military coup which swept a brilliant young Sandhurst-trained army officer to power, an uneasy calm reigns in the backward West African state of Kangan. The failure of the referendum to make him President-for-Life has left His Excellency nervous and embittered, and more and more he looks to his bullish head of state security for reassurance and a firm hand with those he suspects of disloyalty. "For the men who helped put him in power, his oldest friends, the future is suddenly dangerous and uncertain. Chris Okiro, Commissioner for Information, whom His Excellency blames for the referendum defeat, knows his days are numbered as his former classmate grows into the role of ruthless dictator. Ikem Osodi, poet and editor of the National Gazette, is just as uneasy but believes his crusading editorials may yet have influence on his childhood friend. In the blood-letting that follows a peaceful demonstration from the drought-stricken north, both men are in danger of their lives. Together with their friend Beatrice Okah, who is strong, beautiful and wise, they are players in a drama of love and friendship, betrayal and death, that mirrors the history of their troubled land.

"Anthills of the Savannah is an outstanding novel of contemporary Africa, bleak, angry, disenchanted and yet, ultimately, full of hope." First Paragraph: 'You're wasting everybody's time, Mr Commissioner for Information. I will not go to Abazon. Finish! Kabisha! Any other business?' 'As Your Excellency wishes. But...' 'But me no buts. Mr Oriko! The matter is closed, I said. How many times, for God's sake, am I expected to repeat it? Why do you find it so difficult to swallow my ruling. On anything?' 'I am sorry, Your Excellency. But I have no difficulty swallowing and digesting your rulings.' For a full minute or so the fury of his eyes lay on me. Briefly our eyes had been locked in combat. The I had lowered mine to the shiny table-top in ceremonial capitulation. Long silence. But he was not appeased. Rather he was making the silence itself grow rapidly into its own kind of contest, like the eyewink duel of children. I conceded victory there as well.

Without raising my eyes I said again: 'I am very sorry, Your Excellency.' A year ago I would never had said it again that second time - without doing grave violence myself. Now I did it as a casual favour to him. It meant nothing at all to me - no inconvenience whatever - and yet everything to him. From the Heineman hardback edition, 1987. Cover: detail from "Chatterton" by Henry Wallis Dustjacket synopsis: "What is the mystery of Thomas Chatterton? A young poet and elderly female novelist try to decode the clues found within an eighteenth-century manuscript, only to discover that their investigation is disclosing other secrets for which there is no solution. But they are not alone in their quest: the mystery is being revived in an earlier age, as in the mid-nineteenth century Henry Wallis paints his celebrated portrait of Chatterton lying dead in an attic room. And Chatterton himself, the young man who was described as the originator and inspiration of the Romantic Movement, steps forward with his own story of the events that happened in August 1770. "Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton is about death. It is about plagiarism.

It is about the nature of poetry. In Hawksmoor Mr Ackroyd introduced a new sense of time into English fiction, and now in his latest work he has extended his range in ways that will surprise and delight the readers of his earlier novel. Chatterton is at once both tragic and profoundly comic, a meditation on human destiny and a satire on human folly." First Paragraph: 'Come,' he said. 'Let us take a walk into the meadow. I have got the cleverest thing for you that ever was. It is worth half a crown merely to have me read it to you.' He waved the little book at her, but his eager manner frightened the girl and she walked away from him quickly. Then, taking courage from the sight of a friend sitting on the church steps, she called out to him over her shoulder, 'What a poor boy you are, to be sure. And Lord, Tom, how your shoes gape open!' From the Hamish Hamilton hardback edition, 1987.

Cover photograph: 'Father and Son' Dustjacket synopsis: "This is a story about lies and truths and about a painter, a copyist, who paints modern versions of Old Masters and is 'bothered by bills and artistic conscience in about equal measure...susceptible to, bullied and badgered by women'. Major figures on the foreground of his crowded life canvas are Clio, his child-bride and her young boy; Helen, his first wife who left him, badly, but never really separates; and his mother who observes it all with a splendidly caustic humour. In the background, always, is his own silent son.

Nina Bawden is at her best in this novel about the bumbling yet herioc ways we try to defeat the impossibility of protecting another human being with love." Quotes: "Plays with time and notions of forgery and fidelity in life and art, as well as tracing with extraordinary exactness and creative tact, the pain and survival of loss of a loved one" - Guardian First Paragraph: Cover illustration by Kathy Dickinson Quotes: "With its rapid pace and persistent atmosphere of polite menace Moore has created a brilliant thriller - but it is much more than that...As in Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory the personal crisis of one man of God is set against the greater conflict of Church and State and, despite the overwhelming forces of evil, a spiritual triumph is finally achieved. Superficially, The Colour of Blood may seem less complex but its effect is just as impressive" - Time Out "Brian Moore leads the field with a style that can only be called immaculate. The Colour of Blood is a superbly constructed suspense narrative. You can't put it down" - The Guardian "A Hitchcockian sequence of chases, shaken certainties, mistaken identities, masquerades, detections and escapes.

Brian Moore has always shown a mastery of suspense, and having turned his hand now to the political thriller he has produced something exemplary...easily the most accomplished new novel I have read this year" - Sunday Telegraph "Surprise is the essence of this beautifully crafted novel. Brian Moore's versatility, his life-long refusal to keep writing the same book over again, is too much taken for granted. He is a novelist who can be read for pleasure...he writes simply and economically, but with a true generosity of vision" - The Observer First Paragraph: The car taking him back to the Residence entered Proclamation Square sometime between nine and nine-fifteen. He had not looked at his watch since leaving the meeting. It was raining, a summer shower. In the square, the statues, roofs and monumental buildings were wetted slick; the pavement glistened. He switched on the pencil lamp over his clipboard to read, not his notes, but a small book by Bernard of Clairvaux. Do you not think that a man born with reason yet not living according to his reason is, in a certain way, no better than the beasts themselves? For the beast who does not rule himself by reason has an excuse, since this gift is denied him by nature.

But man has no excuse. Sometimes, reading St Bernard, he could abandon the world of his duties and withdraw into that silence where God waited and judged. But now he saw, peripherally, a black car racing very close to his. He turned to look. The driver, a woman, wore a green silk scarf tied around her head. Beside her in the passenger seat, a bearded man, holding a revolver in both hands, raised it, aiming at him. In that moment, Joseph, his chauffeur, wrenched the steering wheel around, deliberately crashing into the black car. Tumbled as in a centrifuge, he was buffeted and thrown clear, his body thudding on wet pavement. He lay for a long moment in a painful stupor staring at the ineluctable darkness of the night sky. From the Paladin paperback edition, 1988. Notes: Cover illustration by Fred Marcellino Dustjacket synopsis: "Iris Murdoch's twenty-third novel begins at a midsummer ball at Oxford, where a group of men and women - friends since university days - have gathered.

Under the stars they dance: the charismatic Gerard Hernshaw; Rose Curtland, who has loved Gerard in silence for years; Duncan Cambus and his restless wife Jean; Jenkin Riderhood, the saintly schoolmaster who is the group's moral center; Tamar Hernshaw, Gerard's tomented niece; and, not least of all, David Crimond, the monomaniacal Marxist genius. Years ago, the friends bonded together to finance a political and philosophical book to be written by Crimond as a memorial to Sinclair Curtland, Rose's brother; on this summer's evening, Crimond's actions at the ball touch off a crisis, and by the night's end the vindictive ghosts of the past have effectively invaded the present. "The Book and the Brotherhood then proceeds at a pace by turns reflective and violent: passion, hatred, a duel, murder, and a suicide pact disturb the old world of academic reflections and skating parties at country weekends. Partners change, Crimond's book is completed, somebody has to die.

"Of Iris Murdoch's last novel, Harold Bloom said on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, "If The Good Apprentice marks the start of her strongest phase, and it may, then a great novel could yet come, rather surprisingly in the...form of the 19th-century realistic novel." This is the form of The Book and the Brotherhood: in its pages Iris Murdoch's genius for portraying the texture of experience makes love, politics, friendship, and the characters caught up in them palpable and immediate. And her wisdom and breadth of vision illuminate their story with a special radiance. The Book and the Brotherhood is a work of astonishing power." Quotes: "A thoroughly gripping, stimulating and challenging fiction...Iris Murdoch takes the conventional romance into nightmare territory" - Stuart Evans, The Times "The structure is that of a suspense novel, at times the romantic suspense novel...Ms. Murdoch is here operating at the height of her formidable talents for language, for narrative, and plot. And in describing emotional states running their crazy course she is superb - Peter Lennon, The Guardian "This is Dame Iris's 23rd novel.

It is the real thing, no 50,000 novella, and it has the assurance of a writer who has worked long in the medium...Her characters care about the human condition and so, clearly, does their creator." - Anthony Burgess, The Observer First Paragraph: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively Week four: readers' responses<p>While readers who come to hear an author discuss his or her book at the Guardian book club are usually fans, those who contribute to the blog on the book club website are sometimes detractors. The impatient and unimpressed are at least as likely to take to the keyboard as the enthusiastic, especially if the book in question has been garlanded with any awards. So there is something unusual about the unanimity of readers writing about Penelope Lively's <em>Moon Tiger </em>on the book club website. Contributors all wanted to express their admiration – but also their sense that Lively's novel has not had its critical due.</p><p>Readers who tried to describe the book's pull focused on the character of its protagonist and occasional narrator, Claudia Hampson, an elderly, dying historian, recalling the fragments of her life from her hospital bed. "Claudia is . .

. confused and irascible, and not particularly endearing," observed one, yet the same reader admitted she was "one of my all-time favourite literary heroines". Another, who found him- or herself drawn to the novel, added, "perhaps because I am intrigued by characters that may, at first, appear wholly unsympathetic". "But is she wholly unsympathetic?" asked another. "From the very beginning there's an impish, bloody-minded charm that is extremely alluring . . . I think a truly unsympathetic protagonist would be someone lacking the kind of charisma that Claudia has."</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Books Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively Week three: writing Moon Tiger<p>I feel now as though someone else wrote it. Which is of course the case – I am not the person that I was 23 years ago. But I remember her, and I know what she was up to, what I was trying to do. I had always wanted to write about Egypt during the second world war, to make use of my own childhood experience there. At the same time.

I was interested in the operation of memory, and the nature of evidence, and wanted to weave these preoccupations into a piece of fiction.</p><p>What is memory? A crutch on which we lean, or an albatross round the neck? History is a matter of conflicting evidence, and so is private life – my version of a particular event will not be the same as yours. And out of this confusion of concerns, <em>Moon Tiger</em> somehow arose.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Penelope Lively Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, week two Week two: divided viewpoints<p>In the late 1980s, Claudia Hampson is 76 and dying in a hospital bed. She has lived through much of the 20th century, and, being a historian, is presumptuous enough to think of her own story as a kind of "history of the world". The novel relies on her narrative curiosity. At the beginning of every chapter we are in her hospital room, following her memories back into the story of her life.

We shift from third-person, present-tense narrative (the nurses ministering to the incoherent patient), to Claudia's own first-person narrative (at once confessional and unapologetic), to re-enacted episodes from her life. With one important exception, every such episode from the past is narrated at least twice: once from Claudia's point of view and once from another character's point of view.</p><p>In some ways, different accounts always dovetail. In Chapter 2, at a party, Claudia's brother Gordon argues with her about her relationship with the feckless Jasper, who is across the room, busily charming some other guests. The altercation is narrated from Claudia's point of view. She tells her disapproving brother that she met Jasper when she went to interview him for a book. Gordon's wife, Sylvia, attempts to find a happier topic of conversation.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Books Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, week one Week one: divided tenses<p>Tell the story of <em>Moon Tiger</em>, and you might hear something like a sad, romantic tale you have heard before.

Headstrong, unconventional Claudia Hampton grows up between the wars, falls in love with Tom, a tank officer, while working as a correspondent in Egypt at the time of El Alamein, and enjoys brief happiness before he is killed. After the war she achieves success as a writer, has affairs and a rather unsatisfactory daughter, but never regains what she knew and has lost. As a story it sounds familiar. Yet, though this is what happens, the novel's narrative – the pattern in which its events are arranged – is utterly unfamiliar and audacious.</p><p>Some of <em>Moon Tiger</em> is told in the past tense, and some in the present tense. Such a division of tenses is rare&nbsp;in fiction: the most famous example is probably <em>Bleak House</em>. Like Dickens's novel, <em>Moon Tiger</em> also alternates narrative voices. The passages in&nbsp;the past tense are narrated in the first person by Claudia as an old woman, looking back on her life. The passages in the present tense are narrated in the third person, though these always include Claudia as one of the actors.

The novel shuttles us between times and between viewpoints, but also between tenses.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Books Guardian Review book club with Penelope Lively See the acclaimed novelist talking to John Mullan about her 1987 Booker prize winner Moon Tiger<p><strong>Date: </strong>Tuesday 11 May<br><strong>Time:</strong> 7.00pm<br><strong>Venue: </strong>Hall Two, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG<br><strong>Price: </strong><a href="">£9.50</a></p><p>Penelope Lively will talk to John Mullan about her 1987 Booker prize-winning novel, Moon Tiger. Celebrated historian Claudia Hampton lies dying in a London hospital.

From her deathbed she recreates a history of her life and times, conjuring up memories of Gordon, her adored brother; Jasper, the charming, untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool, conventional daughter; and Tom, her one great love, both found and lost in wartime Egypt.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Penelope Lively Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively · OverDrive: eBooks, audiobooks and videos for libraries Penelope Lively's Booker Prize winning classic, Moon Tiger is a haunting story of loss and desire. Claudia Hampton - beautiful, famous, independent, dying. But she remains defiant to the last, telling her nurses that she will write a 'history of the world . . . and in the process, my own'. And it is her story from a childhood just after the First World War through the Second and beyond. But Claudia's life is entwined with others and she must allow those who knew her, loved her, the chance to speak, to put across their point of view.

There is Gordon, brother and adversary; Jasper, her untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool conventional daughter; and then there is Tom, her one great love, found and lost in wartime Egypt. 'Leaves its traces in the air long after you've put it away' Anne Tyler 'A complex tapestry of great subtlety. Lively writes so well, savouring the words as she goes' Daily Telegraph 'Very clever: evocative, thought-provoking and hangs on the mind long after it is finished' Literary Review Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger.

Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra's Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year's Honours List, and DBE in 2012. Penelope Lively lives in London. Penelope Lively's life in books - BBC News BBC News Penelope Lively's life in books 31 December 2011 Close share panel Image caption Lively began writing children's novels in her late thirties Author Penelope Lively, who is made a Dame in the New Year's Honours List, is arguably best known for her Booker-winning novel Moon Tiger.

But as an award-winning children's author and the writer of more than 50 books, including How It All Began - published in November - her popularity is not limited to highbrow literary circles. Indeed, early reviews of Moon Tiger were recently described as "distinctly condescending" by Guardian journalist Sam Jordison, with the novel regarded as "the housewife's choice" among Booker rivals of the time. It went on to confound all expectations and clinch the 1987 prize, beating favoured literary powerhouses Iris Murdoch and Peter Ackroyd to the title. It was an accolade which Lively, with characteristic humility, described as "disconcerting". "How do you follow it up?" she said later, speaking of her unexpected success. Born and raised in Cairo - where much of Moon Tiger is set - Lively was educated at boarding school in Sussex from the age of 12 and later attended Oxford University, where she read Modern History. In 1957, at the age of 24, she married Jack Lively with whom she had two children, Josephine and Adam.

'Having a go' Lively did not embark on a writing career until she was in her late thirties when her children were both school age, but her talent was recognised almost immediately. "It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go," she told The Observer's Robert McCrum in 2001. "I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children." As a children's writer, she flourished in the 1970s, winning the Carnegie Medal in 1973 for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, and picking up the Whitbread Children's Book Award for A Stitch in Time in 1976. Then, in 1977, came her first adult novel, The Road to Lichfield - the tale of a woman dealing with her father's impending death and reassessing their lives in the process.

I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children Penelope Lively The Road to Lichfield was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, ultimately losing out to Paul Scott's Staying On - but it marked out Lively as one to watch. Hot on its heels came a book of short stories, and Treasures of Time, both of which picked up awards - and in 1984, Lively made the Booker shortlist again, this time for According to Mark. Her rivals included Julian Barnes, JG Ballard, Anita Desai and David Lodge. Anita Brookner won the award for Hotel du Lac. Three years later, came Booker victory and a Whitbread nomination. Since then, Lively has continued to write novels that are both emotionally demanding yet retain a broad appeal. "She is interested in the operation of memory - how it works and how we use it - and with the nature of evidence," wrote her editor at Penguin, Juliet Annan. "Her preoccupations are with telling a tale from different angles...

But also, like any good historian, she is meticulous in her research." "Approaching her 80th year, Lively's sense of humour lives up to her name," said a reviewer of her latest book in the Sunday Telegraph. "Whatever your age, How It All Began is a splendid tonic." The author, now widowed, lives in London and has six grandchildren. Penelope Lively - Literature Literature David Higham Associates Ltd Biography Novelist and children's writer Penelope Lively was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1933 and brought up there. She came to England in 1945, went to school in Sussex, and read Modern History at St Ann's College, Oxford. Her many books written for children include Astercote (1970), The Whispering Knights (1971),The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973), which won the Carnegie Medal, and A Stitch in Time (1976), which won the Whitbread Children's Book Award. Her retelling of The Aeneid, entitled In Search of a Homeland, was published in 2001 with illustrations by Ian Andrew.

Her most recent children's book is One, Two, Three...Jump (1998). Her first novel written for adults was The Road to Lichfield (1977), shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. It was followed by Treasures of Time (1979), winner of the Arts Council National Book Award and Judgement Day (1980). According to Mark (1984) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. She won the Booker Prize for Fiction with Moon Tiger (1987), the story of a woman journalist's reflections on a troubled life as she lies dying in a hospital bed, overshadowed by the memories of a love affair with a young soldier during the Second World War. Further novels include Cleopatra's Sister (1993), Heatwave (1996) and Spiderweb (1998), the story of Stella Brentwood, a retired anthropologist, struggling to settle in a small village in Somerset after a lifetime spent travelling through Egypt, Greece and the Mediterranean. Her novel, The Photograph (2003), is the story of a chance discovery that reveals the secrets of a woman's life.

Recent books include Making it Up (2005), a form of anti-memoir, in which she imagines alternative outcomes to her life; Consequences, a novel published in 2007; Family Album (2009), which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award and How It All Began (2012). Nothing Missing but the Samovar (1978), a collection of short stories, won the Southern Arts Literature Prize. Many of her short stories are collected in Pack of Cards: Collected Short Stories 1978-1986 (1986). She has written three volumes of autobiography, Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived (1994), a description of her childhood spent in Egypt, A House Unlocked (2001), which continues the story in England and Ammonites and Leaping Fish (2013), which she bills as 'not quite a memoir' but a reflection on old age and memory. Penelope Lively contributes regularly to a number of national daily newspapers and literary and educational journals including the Sunday Times, The Observer and the Times Educational Supplement.

She has written radio and television scripts and was presenter of a BBC Radio 4 programme on children's literature. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of PEN and a former Chairman of The Society of Authors. She was awarded an OBE in 1989, a CBE in 2001 and a DBE in 2012. Author statement Critical perspective Since the publication of her first novel in 1970 (a children’s book entitled Astercote), Penelope Lively has developed into a writer who is as prolific as she is wide ranging. She is the author of over forty novels, short story collections and children’s fiction and has published in everything from The Literary Review to Woman’s Own, from Cosmopolitan to Books and Bookmen. As such diverse publications suggest, Lively’s work appeals to both a youthful, popular audience keen to find escape within a good yarn and to an academic audience interested in her experimental narrative techniques and her creation of what postmodern scholars sometimes refer to as ‘historiographical metafiction’. Lively is especially concerned with the relationship between the past and memory, a concern that can be traced back to her years as an undergraduate when she read modern history.

Speaking on the subject of memory, Lively has said she is interested in 'the ways in which the physical world is composed of memory, the ways in which it’s an encumbrance and the ways in which it is an asset … I can hardly decide which it is. But it is something that I’m constantly aware of and constantly seeking new ways of exploring fictionally'. It is the element of what she refers to here as ‘undecidability’ within her fictional prose that characterises her best work such as her Booker prize winning Moon Tiger (1987). The protagonist of Moon Tiger is, fittingly enough, an historian. Claudia Hampton is dying of stomach cancer and from her death bed decides to preserve her past in the form of a novel. This leaves Claudia struggling to distinguish between official, public history and more personal recollections of love and loss during the second world war. Cairo is key to her narrative, and here Lively might be said to be drawing on her own experiences of Egypt as a child. Cairo is an ambivalent post-colonial space in Moon Tiger, a landscape in which Egyptians and Europeans alike seem both liberated by and shackled to a colonial past.

History and memory also combine to powerful effect in Lively’s more recent novel, The Photograph (2003). When Glyn Peters discovers an old photograph of his wife holding the hand of another man, his world is turned upside down. Like Claudia Hampton, Glyn Peters is an historian, but where Claudia struggles to write the past, Glyn struggles to reimagine it. The history he thought he knew seems to have deserted him like an unfaithful lover. Lively’s next novel is an alternative history of the author, a sustained speculation on where she might have ended up had she done things differently at key moments of his life. Making it up (2005) is, in the author’s words, a work of anti-memoir which abandons linear causal history for a sense of the past and its pathways as both arbitrary, random and of deadly serious consequence. Consequences (2007) is both the title and subject of Lively’s latest work. Exploring how ‘destinies can change in an instant’ through the lives of three generations of woman across the twentieth century, the book is in some ways a extension of the biographical departures witnessed already in Making it Up.

In contrast to the sad, sophisticated prose of much of Lively’s mature work, her earliest books are for children. Although she has continued to write for children ever since (her work appears regularly on school reading lists), her adult novel, The Road to Lichfield (1977) is often cited as a turning point in her career. Like Moon Tiger, this novel is also centred upon a figure on their death bed (death is a recurring theme in Lively’s work). This time it is Ann Linton’s father who has been taken to a nursing home in Lichfield. Within the midst of this sombre story Ann falls unexpectedly in love with David Fielding. The Road to Lichfield is a moving story that skilfully articulates the death of one relationship alongside the birth of another.In more recent work such as Cleopatra’s Sister (1993), Lively has developed different points of focus, tension and intersection such as those between class and sexuality. The subject of Cleopatra’s Sister is Callimbia, an imaginary Middle Eastern country. This war-torn landscape is also the subject of the work of Howard (a palaeontologist) and Lucy (a journalist).

Howard and Lucy are ambitious, career-minded protagonists, yet despite and because of their training both fail to comprehend (or render comprehensible) the landscape in which they find themselves trapped. As gaps gradually open between the pair’s perceptions of Callimbia and those of the omniscient narrator, Cleopatra’s Sister emerges as a novel about the politics of interpretation and the largely untranslatable boundaries between self and other. More than just a novelist, Lively is a master of the modern short story, not to mention a popular practitioner of the ghost story, from Uninvited Ghosts and Other Stories (1997) to her recent contribution in Spooky Stories (2008). Lively is also an accomplished writer of non-fiction. Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived (1994) is a compelling, critically acclaimed autobiography of the author’s youth in Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s. Like Cleopatra’s Sister however, and as its subtitle suggests, this is a text concerned with perceptions, glimpses and interpretations of the past, rather than a singular authoritative history.

Among other things it offers a vivid depiction of World War II from a North African perspective that readers of Moon Tiger will find particularly illuminating. Dr James Procter, 2009 Carnegie Medal Author statement 'In writing fiction I am trying to impose order upon chaos, to give structure and meaning to what is apparently random. People have always sought explanations and palliatives for the arbitrary judgements of fate. I am an agnostic, and while I would not suggest the construction of fiction as an alternative to religious belief, it does seem to me that many writers - and I am certainly one - look at it as an opportunity to perceive and explain pattern and meaning in human existence. I am also deeply conscious of the limitations of experience - the sense in which the writer is fettered by gender, age and social and historical context. It seems to me that the challenge of writing novels and short stories is to transcend and translate personal experience, to try to give a universal and comprehensible significance to things which seem part of the fortuitous scenery of one's own life. But a view of the world is essentially and inevitably a personal one, conditioned by circumstance; I write within the English tradition of saying serious things in a relatively light-hearted way.

Two of the qualities I most admire in other writers are accuracy and concision - the ability to say most by saying least; with this in mind what I am always trying to do is to find ways of translating ideas and observations into character and narrative. The short story can act as a concentrated beam of light; the novel is a more expansive and dispersed reflection. They do different things, I think, but both depend upon selection and metamorphosis - taking from life the situations that seem to offer insights, and then giving them the form and discipline of fiction.' Related links: From Twitter @LitBritish RT @LitBritish : We are delighted to announce our Polish author delegation for #LBFPoland ! Download our full press release here: … (26 mins ago) Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively Week four: readers' responses<p>While readers who come to hear an author discuss his or her book at the Guardian book club are usually fans, those who contribute to the blog on the book club website are sometimes detractors. The impatient and unimpressed are at least as likely to take to the keyboard as the enthusiastic, especially if the book in question has been garlanded with any awards.

So there is something unusual about the unanimity of readers writing about Penelope Lively's <em>Moon Tiger </em>on the book club website. Contributors all wanted to express their admiration – but also their sense that Lively's novel has not had its critical due.</p><p>Readers who tried to describe the book's pull focused on the character of its protagonist and occasional narrator, Claudia Hampson, an elderly, dying historian, recalling the fragments of her life from her hospital bed. "Claudia is . . . confused and irascible, and not particularly endearing," observed one, yet the same reader admitted she was "one of my all-time favourite literary heroines". Another, who found him- or herself drawn to the novel, added, "perhaps because I am intrigued by characters that may, at first, appear wholly unsympathetic". "But is she wholly unsympathetic?" asked another. "From the very beginning there's an impish, bloody-minded charm that is extremely alluring . . .

I think a truly unsympathetic protagonist would be someone lacking the kind of charisma that Claudia has."</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Books Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively Week three: writing Moon Tiger<p>I feel now as though someone else wrote it. Which is of course the case – I am not the person that I was 23 years ago. But I remember her, and I know what she was up to, what I was trying to do. I had always wanted to write about Egypt during the second world war, to make use of my own childhood experience there. At the same time. I was interested in the operation of memory, and the nature of evidence, and wanted to weave these preoccupations into a piece of fiction.</p><p>What is memory? A crutch on which we lean, or an albatross round the neck? History is a matter of conflicting evidence, and so is private life – my version of a particular event will not be the same as yours.

And out of this confusion of concerns, <em>Moon Tiger</em> somehow arose.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Penelope Lively Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, week two Week two: divided viewpoints<p>In the late 1980s, Claudia Hampson is 76 and dying in a hospital bed. She has lived through much of the 20th century, and, being a historian, is presumptuous enough to think of her own story as a kind of "history of the world". The novel relies on her narrative curiosity. At the beginning of every chapter we are in her hospital room, following her memories back into the story of her life. We shift from third-person, present-tense narrative (the nurses ministering to the incoherent patient), to Claudia's own first-person narrative (at once confessional and unapologetic), to re-enacted episodes from her life. With one important exception, every such episode from the past is narrated at least twice: once from Claudia's point of view and once from another character's point of view.</p><p>In some ways, different accounts always dovetail.

In Chapter 2, at a party, Claudia's brother Gordon argues with her about her relationship with the feckless Jasper, who is across the room, busily charming some other guests. The altercation is narrated from Claudia's point of view. She tells her disapproving brother that she met Jasper when she went to interview him for a book. Gordon's wife, Sylvia, attempts to find a happier topic of conversation.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Books Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, week one Week one: divided tenses<p>Tell the story of <em>Moon Tiger</em>, and you might hear something like a sad, romantic tale you have heard before. Headstrong, unconventional Claudia Hampton grows up between the wars, falls in love with Tom, a tank officer, while working as a correspondent in Egypt at the time of El Alamein, and enjoys brief happiness before he is killed. After the war she achieves success as a writer, has affairs and a rather unsatisfactory daughter, but never regains what she knew and has lost. As a story it sounds familiar.

Yet, though this is what happens, the novel's narrative – the pattern in which its events are arranged – is utterly unfamiliar and audacious.</p><p>Some of <em>Moon Tiger</em> is told in the past tense, and some in the present tense. Such a division of tenses is rare&nbsp;in fiction: the most famous example is probably <em>Bleak House</em>. Like Dickens's novel, <em>Moon Tiger</em> also alternates narrative voices. The passages in&nbsp;the past tense are narrated in the first person by Claudia as an old woman, looking back on her life. The passages in the present tense are narrated in the third person, though these always include Claudia as one of the actors.

The novel shuttles us between times and between viewpoints, but also between tenses.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Books Guardian Review book club with Penelope Lively See the acclaimed novelist talking to John Mullan about her 1987 Booker prize winner Moon Tiger<p><strong>Date: </strong>Tuesday 11 May<br><strong>Time:</strong> 7.00pm<br><strong>Venue: </strong>Hall Two, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG<br><strong>Price: </strong><a href="">£9.50</a></p><p>Penelope Lively will talk to John Mullan about her 1987 Booker prize-winning novel, Moon Tiger. Celebrated historian Claudia Hampton lies dying in a London hospital.

From her deathbed she recreates a history of her life and times, conjuring up memories of Gordon, her adored brother; Jasper, the charming, untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool, conventional daughter; and Tom, her one great love, both found and lost in wartime Egypt.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Penelope Lively Booker club: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively Ludicrously patronised by reviewers, Penelope Lively's novel is actually one of the very best Booker winners ever<p>"The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness." </p><p>I include this quote in case you were wondering about the title, and also because it suggests some of the appeal of Penelope Lively's Booker winner. Atmospheric enough in its own right, the image takes on more power when you know that this Moon Tiger comes into focus because it lies beside two lovers – Claudia and Tom – on one of their last snatched nights together in Cairo during the second world war.

Tom is about to return to the frontline – and death – and the two have barely even had time to get to know each other. The coil burns away as Claudia tries to cement Tom in her mind and gets him to tell her his life story. Eventually, he comes to her. "I like this part of the story best," she says, and Lively writes: "And oh God, thinks Claudia, may it have a happy ending. Please may it have a happy ending. The Moon Tiger is almost entirely burned away now; its green spiral is mirrored by an ash spiral in the saucer." What she doesn't write, but what we see, is the march of time, relentlessly trampling every moment into the past; the ash-spiral fragility of memory; the transience of passion; the fact that even when we burn brightest we are already dying … </p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Booker prize Observer interview with author Penelope Lively Robert McCrum interviews Penelope Lively about her life as an author, having won the Booker Prize in 1987 for Moon Tiger, and her new book, A House Unlocked<p><strong> Observer: </strong> What made you write A House Unlocked?

</p><p> <strong> Penelope Lively: </strong> When the house had to be disposed of, after my aunt died in 1995, my children and I were all heartbroken. We'd known it all our lives and it was terribly important to us. In the weeks and months afterwards we kept thinking it was all gone. And then, of course, I realised that it wasn't, because I had it in my head. And my daughter and I particularly used to talk about it and move around the house saying, 'No, that picture was there. No, no, no, that's where that carpet was.' So I realised that I had this memory house and would never lose it. And then I started to make analogies with Frances Yates's The Art of Memory and began to think maybe I could write about it. </p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Penelope Lively Moon Tiger : Penelope Lively : 9780141044842 Add to basket Add to wishlist Description Penelope Lively's Booker Prize winning classic, Moon Tiger is a haunting story of loss and desire. Claudia Hampton - beautiful, famous, independent, dying.

But she remains defiant to the last, telling her nurses that she will write a 'history of the world ...and in the process, my own'. And it is her story from a childhood just after the First World War through the Second and beyond. But Claudia's life is entwined with others and she must allow those who knew her, loved her, the chance to speak, to put across their point of view. There is Gordon, brother and adversary; Jasper, her untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool conventional daughter; and then there is Tom, her one great love, found and lost in wartime Egypt. 'Leaves its traces in the air long after you've put it away' Anne Tyler 'A complex tapestry of great subtlety. Lively writes so well, savouring the words as she goes' Daily Telegraph 'Very clever: evocative, thought-provoking and hangs on the mind long after it is finished' Literary Review Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children.

She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra's Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year's Honours List, and DBE in 2012. Penelope Lively lives in London.

show more Product details 126 x 194 x 16mm | 158.76g Publication date Contemporary Fiction Review quote Leaves its traces in the air long after you've put it away -- Anne Tyler A complex tapestry of great subtlety. Lively writes so well, savouring the words as she goes Daily Telegraph Very clever: evocative, thought-provoking and hangs on the mind long after it is finished Literary Review show more About Penelope Lively Penelope Lively has written many prize-winning novels for adults and children. They include: The Road To Lichfield, According To Mark, Moon Tiger (which won the 1987 Booker Prize), Heat Wave, Spiderweb, The Photograph, Making It Up, Consequences and Family Album. Penelope Lively lives in London. show more Review Text Moon Tiger – Better Reading Winner of the 1987 Booker Prize Claudia Hampton – beautiful, famous, independent, dying. But she remains defiant to the last, telling her nurses that she will write a ‘history of the world . . . and in the process, my own’.

And it is her story from a childhood just after the First World War through the Second and beyond. But Claudia’s life is entwined with others and she must allow those who knew her, loved her, the chance to speak, to put across their point of view. There is Gordon, brother and adversary; Jasper, her untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool conventional daughter; and then there is Tom, her one great love, found and lost in wartime Egypt. Moon Tiger is a haunting story of loss and desire. Overview 01 January, 1987 About Penelope Lively Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger .

Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind;Cleopatra's Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt;Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph;Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year's Honours List, and DBE in 2012. Penelope Lively lives in London.

Question: Who wrote the 1987 Booker Prize winning novel 'Moon Tiger'?
Answer: Penelope Lively